Design guidelines for Iteration 3

Combining modes of Breathing, Temperature, and Ears

Notes from Demos for Haptic Symposium Visitors

“All make [the phone] seem alive”

Vibrate/waddle: snoring, purring, more whimsical ring, pleasant

Vibrate: buzzing, ramps up/down more smoothly than a regular phone, shivering/cold

Waddle: cat-like when it does it by itself

Breathing: nervous, beating, creature inside, something beating, organic, artificial heart, heart beat, nervous, breathing, creature trying to get out, tapping/poking, know it’s a servo  …feels uneven (to be breathing it needs to be more smooth), the click when it goes down make makes it feel artificial

Ears wiggle: pay attention to me, happy, it’s wiggling its ears, wagging its tail, sounds angry

…when they hold it at the ears end, the other end moves

Ears that move once: pay attention to me when you have time, don’t touch me here, reptilian, muscle tension, curling up

Hot/cold: cell phones already get hot – normal plugged in electronic

Foam: Very pleasant to touch. Could communicate differently than if they were made of plastic

Random Notes/Suggestions:

Almost everyone pushed down hard on the prototype

Add a string gauge…. measures the deformation of a device

Possible reference: Matthew Bowman, Tom Hazelton …emulating attention getting …would be a good reference (emotion expression stuff)

In the area of Organic Haptics

One ‘mode’/area’ we are exploring is Shape changing.

Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro …doing similar research

Meeting Notes – March 1, 2012

ANGRY / DISTRESSED (NEGATIVE VALENCE, HIGH AROUSAL)

• fast/strong vibrate or breathing, and heat
• red
• red and fast vibrate/breathing
• ears/body shape and breathing/vibrate
• tense and breathing/vibrate and red
• texture??
• puffed up

EXCITED (POSITIVE VALENCE, HIGH AROUSAL)

• perked ears and breathing/vibrate
• large/slow vibration (waddle/rock)
• color/rainbow (fast color change) and vibrate/breathing

NEUTRAL/AWARE

If the phone is always moving (during neutral), are people more likely to interpret this as the phone’s emotions vs other people emotions?

– living neutral vs phone neutral/phone off

How to then convey neutral text messages?

Can we separate neutral and relaxed?

• even breathing
• twitch ears slowly
• shrugging (corners go up or come together)
• slightly cool?

RELAXED (POSITIVE VALENCE, LOW AROUSAL)

• untensed/expanded
• slow breathing
• warm

DEPRESSED / COLD/ICY

•  cold

OUR BIG FOUR

Vibrate (small and large)

Temperature

Breathing

Ears

Maybe add color and noise later… as a way of helping it along, help people tell them apart …can be a kind of visual illusion

PROTOTYPES

Ears (mechanized or puppet)

Breathing (mechanized)

Vibrate and temperature (mechanized)

DIMENSIONS

For now, aim for one inch wider and one inch longer than iPhone dimensions

All the prototypes are currently 13cm x 7cm

SHOPPING LIST

• peltier plate or two
• heat sink
• small buzzers
• smaller servos
• small unenclosed vibrator

Meeting Notes – February 27, 2012

Discussion with Oliver (Jessica)

– Oliver looked at the phone expressing the phone’s emotion. Found that people can interpret phone’s emotion. Makes sense to look at how we can get people to interpret the emotions as someone else’s emotions (via the phone)… could just be a context thing, like making the phone ring.

– Were able to get some negative emotions (scared, creepy, etc)

– positive valence and high arousal would probably be easier to communicate (people like to interpret things as happy… Jessica and Oliver’s opinion) …Oliver found that the really animated one were negative

Heikkinen 2009

– if people receive a emotional message they want to be able to reciprocate

– section 4.2.2 is most important/relevant

– communicating emotion just using touch

– concerned about privacy …we may still be concerned with privacy (but maybe for different reasons)

Other paper Jessica read

– emotional expressivity

– interpreting people’s body movements as a way to express emotion

– talk about how to characterize things

– sent crazy color pictures to people

Ways to pick emotions

– pick emotions that give us good coverage of the chart

– pick emotions commonly expressed in emails/texts

– pick emotions that would be easiest to express with a phone

– Looking at the four corners of the emotion quadrant for now… keep things really far apart for now… see where there might be blending, or where differentiation is needed, then adjust what emotions we’re focusing on.

– intimate messages (love, etc) might be important to explore… fall under ‘pleased’

Literature Review

To keep track of what each of us has read for our lit review…

Juliette:

Introducing the HiPhone (Oliver Schneider et al.) Oliver looked at “emotion” in terms of…

Take me by the hand: haptic compasses in mobile devices through shape change and weight shift (Fabian Hemmert et al.) Looks at shape change and weight shift for navigational purposes.

Shape-changing mobiles: Tapering in one-dimensional deformation displays in mobile phones (Fabian Hemmert et al.) This is the paper where they change the tapering of the back panel of the phone. Applications: interactive feedback (e.g. scrolling), user notification (e.g. file download status), ambient display (e.g. battery status). Visual and blind user study, looking at accuracy of determining panel angle.

Ambient life: Calm and excited pulsation as a means of life-like permanent tactile status display in mobile phones (Fabian Hemmert and Gesche Joost) In this paper we present Ambient Life, a novel notification system for mobile phones (focuses on ambient display). It is based on a cognitive mechanism that humans are inherently good at: the perception of life. The proposed system employs basic life-like movements, like breath and pulse, to display the state of a mobile phone. The phone can either be “calm” (representing no missed calls, SMS or similar) or “excited” (representing missed events, requiring attention). Two prototypes and a user study are presented. The outcomes of the study are mixed; while most users generally liked the idea of a living phone and were able to determine changes in the pulse frequency almost instantly, the acceptance of the new functionality depended strongly on the situation the phone was used in.

• The system simulates excitement (high pulse, as for a missed call/sms/appointment) and, more importantly, calmness (normal pulse, i.e. as for sufficient battery, good network reception, and no missed events). Opposed to all other mobile phones, it actively communicates that everything is fine, and that there is no need to check it.
• Interesting idea of using a mobile shaped shell.
• Interpretation varied across situations (in hand vs afar vs in pocket), people founds pulsing annoying.

Physical embodiments for mobile communication agents. (Stefan Marti and Chris Schmandt) This is the paper where they made a furry squirrel into a phone.

Designing cally,: a cell-phone robot. (Ji-Dong Yim and Christopher D. Shaw) This is the paper where they stuck a phone on a robot body. They had an interesting pilot project where they had people dress up like phones.

Thanks Tail video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47CX3hjpjRk

Shathel:

Evaluation of Unsupervised Emotion Models to Textual Affect Recognition: provides techniques for detecting emotions in text

Expectations for User Experience in Haptic Communication with Mobile Devices: adminstered focus groups to study user expectations of haptic interaction on mobile devices.

Expressing Emotion in Text-based Communication: how users differentiate between negative and positive affect in text-based content

Meeting Notes – February 23, 2012

Big decision day! Many hours were spent figuring out how we want to proceed with the project for the second iteration.

In the end, we’ve decided not to proceed with the Haptic Creature inspiration, and instead to focus on exploring emotion in the HiPhone.

Photo notes:

Direction?

. . . We think we have one! Focus on the expression of notifications that contain content through emotion.

Notifications we’re thinking of specifically: Communication based notifications, i.e. text, phone calls.

Next Steps
1. Individual lit reviews
2. Individual brainstorming of emotions (May want to start with notifcations we want to show . . .or maybe not. Your call!)

Next team meeting: February 28 at 1:30pm.

Days until next iteration due: 14 days . . . That seems like plenty!

. . . Drawings!
Shathel is We are awesome at drawing!